Scott Perry

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Chairman, I thank the chairman for his hard work on the bill. None of this is easy. This amendment addresses a potential solution for our Nation's veterans and servicemembers suffering with PTSD and PTSI. Estimates from the VA paint a harsh picture that 7 percent of veterans will have PTSD, with about 29 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans having PTSD at some point in their lives. Unfortunately, far too few of these brave men and women find relief from currently available treatment in the VA, and failure here can mean suicide. The average number of veteran suicides per day was 17.5 in 2021. I shudder to think that, every single day, 17 to 20 of our fellow brothers and sisters in arms take their lives. These numbers, quite honestly, are unacceptable. They are unacceptable to this side of the aisle. I think they are unacceptable to the other side of the aisle, and they are unacceptable to America. That is why I am offering this amendment, which would increase and decrease Veterans Health Administration funding by $1 million for the purpose of furnishing stellate ganglion blocker, or SGB, treatment therapy to veterans suffering from PTSD. Already approved by the VA as a safe and effective alternative, the stellate ganglion block procedure injects an anesthetic agent into or onto a collection of nerves in the neck, and it is proven to alleviate common PTSD symptoms. In PTSD and some other anxiety conditions, the fight-or-flight nervous system gets stuck in the on position. By precisely placing anesthetic around the stellate ganglion, the unproductive and chronic fight-or-flight response is turned off. This allows neurotransmitters in the brain to reset back to a nonanxiety state and results in long- term relief of the anxiety itself and the PTSD symptoms. This procedure has already improved many lives while showing up to 85 percent efficacy at a fraction of the cost of other treatments that are far less effective. Madam Chair, that is 85 percent. Having this life-changing option for our veterans would give them a chance to live more free from the effects of PTSD and its symptoms. Our Nation's veterans should be the top priority, and they deserve to have this treatment and this therapy when they need it. Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Chair, the treatment is not dangerous at all. As a matter of fact, it is offered in at least 11 VA facilities, but only that many, and not all of the VA facilities. It has been around since the 1920s. It is not dangerous at all. As a matter of fact, there are no known side-effects. There aren't any known side-effects. The people that get the treatment walk away 85 percent of the time without suffering the effects of PTSD. As I sat there and watched the treatment being given, Madam Chair, the patients have told me that they feel like a weight is lifted off of them while the treatment is occurring. Those are specious claims. The bureaucracy at the VA wants to conduct another study. Meanwhile, it is allowed in some of their facilities, but not all of their facilities. Meanwhile, while they are conducting another study, 17 to 22 of our veterans take their lives every day while they are conducting another study. While offering this at some places but not other places, servicemembers in Alabama are scraping up their last dollars to get on a van with some of their other buddies to drive up here to get the treatment because they can't get it down at the VA in Alabama. It is absurd. It is ridiculous. While they are conducting studies, our servicemembers are taking their lives needlessly. What I am asking is, instead of the current protocol, which says that members of the military services who have earned this treatment, who have earned the care, don't have to fail every single other thing that the VA gives them before they can get this and, in the meantime, take their lives because that is what happens, Madam Chair. The VA requires, except in those other facilities, that the veteran do all these other things, take all these other treatments that don't work and have to fail every single one of them before they can say, oh, please, VA, can you give me something that works, the stellate ganglion block, the SGB, which is done in the private sector, which is done at the VA. I am just saying, instead of making veterans suffer and take their lives before they can get the treatment, let them have the treatment like the veterans in those 11 facilities that do offer it. Why can't we do that? You can keep studying it. If you find some side effect, well, God bless you, but right now, there aren't any and right now, veterans are killing themselves.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. You are talking about bringing down substantially, almost cataclysmically----

Mr. PERRY. That is fine, but substantially, the magnitude. That money is going somewhere right now.

Mr. PERRY. If the gentleman would yield?

Mr. PERRY. I don't know if you talked about disability, where we have gotten the money for the increase in disability, how we are making up for that, what the growth of that number looks like, and what the plan for the future is.

Mr. PERRY. Where do we get that money?

Mr. PERRY. Wherever that is going, those folks want that money.

Mr. PERRY. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PERRY. Are you talking about, to be clear, crashing the cost of healthcare?

Mr. PERRY. I am not going to hold my breath.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Of course I do. We have fought bitterly. I mean, even if you just look at the last few years here since the pandemic, the pandemic was unexpected, decisions were made, and in hindsight we obviously made some wrong choices. Be that as it may, it was expensive. People were out of work. The government forced them out of work, forced them to close their businesses. It was only right, since the government had the authority and the power to do that, to make them as whole as possible. Now, we can debate that as long as we want to, but subsequent to the end of the pandemic, it should have been reasonable for the people in this room on either side of the aisle to say: Well, let's just reset back to prepandemic. Believe it or not, at that time, if we had just gone back to that number, the budget would have balanced.

Mr. PERRY. We would actually have taken in enough revenue to pay for the things that we were buying, but a substantial portion of this body, unfortunately, my friends, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, said: No, no, no. We are going to keep spending now at the pandemic level even though the pandemic is over.

Mr. PERRY. Right. It does.

Mr. PERRY. Of course, I have heard it. I have heard it ever since I have been here. There is always some reason: We have a slim majority. We don't have a majority at all. We don't have 60. We don't have the Presidency. We have this House, not that body. It is the courts. There is always some reason to say we can't do it. I was in a committee hearing today talking about waste and abuse on foreign affairs. I found out that we send money to Nepal to support atheism. We send some of your money to Nepal, which is a highly religious society, to support atheism. What I am told is: Well, not all bills are perfect. Nobody agrees with that, but we had to get the bill passed. Well, somebody agreed with it. It ended up in there.

Mr. PERRY. Somebody wanted that, so I am supposed to go along with that. The people that I represent that wake up early in the morning and go to work and pay their taxes, their money is going for that when they can't afford their electricity bill, their food bill, or their daycare bill. It is insane. This whole thing about a wide-open border, not only can they not afford to pay the bills, but their kids can't even get jobs now coming out of high school because they are competing with people who are here illegally who will take those jobs where you start out, where the only skill you have, Mr. Roy, is, I can show up on time with a good attitude. That is the skill I had when I was 13 or 14 years old, right? That is the skill I had when I started. You start out doing things that maybe a lot of people don't want to do, but now there are other people in this country with a work permit. Your kids can't even get started anymore. That is the insult upon injury. You are being taxed out of your homes. You can't afford your bills. Other people are taking your work. You are being told to sit down and shut up and just take it, whether you are in Congress or, Heaven forbid, you are at home and you are watching on TV and you are saying: What do I do about any of this? I told my Representative, and they said they can't stop it.

Mr. PERRY. Mandated by the government.

Mr. PERRY. Like the kill switch.

Mr. PERRY. I do agree. I do agree with that completely. Protecting that, and, of course, what we are seeing right now is the protection or the attempted protection of that at the Presidential level. For 3\1/2\ years, I have watched the President say: I can't do anything about a wide-open border. I can't take any action. There is nothing I can do. It must come from the legislature. Yet, somehow, now that all the polls have turned around and it looks ominous in 5 months, somehow, he found the wherewithal to say: Well, shazam, I can take executive action. Who knew? Well, the American people knew because, before he got there, executive action was taken, and the border was relatively secure, much more secure than it is now. For 3\1/2\ years, it has been wide open, and, essentially, our President just acknowledged what we all knew, that this has been meaningful. This has been by design, the wide-open border has been intentional, and he could have done something about it, but he chose not to until he had no other choice politically. Even at that, I am sure that my good friend from Texas, who is on the front lines in Texas, is going to talk about the provisions of this. The one I find interesting, we are going to stop these people coming in once we hit the threshold unless they are minors, unaccompanied children. Unless they are minors, unaccompanied children, we are going to let--so we are going to allow the sex trafficking of children to continue, even as we know that our Federal Government has lost track of literally tens of thousands of children illegally in our country, unaccompanied.

Mr. PERRY. Yes, 85,000. Right. Yeah.

Mr. PERRY. When is the invasion clause operable then?

Mr. PERRY. When is it? Never?

Mr. PERRY. If you came across with a gun and you were wearing a uniform with your name on it, that is an invasion. If you don't have a gun and you don't have a uniform, no matter what your intentions are or the scale, that is not an invasion.

Mr. PERRY. Legally.